Discussion of the events, individuals, movements, peoples and connections that, sometimes together, sometimes separately, make up the History of the World. Questions are welcome.

Monday, February 17, 2014

A Little Help, If You Please

Repost:

The historian in us has been stymied by a dilemma. Someone sent an email to us with a quotation attributed to George Washington. Here is the quotation:

"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceived veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated by our nation." -- President George Washington

We have been unable to verify that this is indeed from our first president. We have the works of George Washington in our library, and have been browsing through it several times over looking for it. Supposedly it was said by Washington in 1789. We have been through that section of his complete works several times over, and have not been able to find the source of the quote.

Can anyone help with this dilemma and provide a link to a verifying source?

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"History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives."--Abba Eban

"History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, however, if faced with courage, need not be lived again."--Maya Angelou

"There is no witness so dreadful, no accuser so terrible as the conscience that dwells in the heart of every man."--Polybius

"History is a voice forever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity."--James A. Froude

"History is philosophy teaching by example, and also warning; its two eyes are geography and chronology."--James A. Garfield

"Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity."--Hermann Hesse

"The history of the human race, viewed as a whole may be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about a political constitution, internally, and for this purpose, also externally perfect, as the only state in which all the capacities implanted by her in mankind can be fully developed."--Immanuel Kant

"From the beginning of our history the country has been afflicted with compromise. It is by compromise that human rights have been abandoned. I insist that this shall cease. The country needs repose after all its trials; it deserves repose. And repose can only be found in everlasting principles."--Charles Sumner

"History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap."--Ronald W. Reagan

"If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience."--George Bernard Shaw

"We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing."--R. D. Laing

"If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run - and often in the short one - the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative."--Arthur C. Clarke

"How could you be a Great Man if history brought you no Great Events, or brought you to them at the wrong time, too young, too old?"--Lois McMaster Bujold

"Indeed, what is there that does not appear marvelous when it comes to our knowledge for the first time? How many things, too, are looked upon as quite impossible until they have been actually effected?"--Pliny the Elder

"The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny."--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself."--Georg W. Hegel

"Europe will never be like America. Europe is a product of history. America is a product of philosophy."--Margaret Thatcher

"The history of our race, and each individual's experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal."--Mark Twain

"America has never been an empire. We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused, preferring greatness to power and justice to glory."--George W. Bush

"The peaceful transfer of authority is rare in history, yet common in our country. With a simple oath, we affirm old traditions and make new beginnings."--George W. Bush

"History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history."--Clarence Darrow

"It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature."--Henry James

"Men make history, and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better."--Harry S Truman

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."--H. G. Wells

"It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."--Robert F. Kennedy